One Man's Trash, Part 6b
Jayne has made his bed, and now he must lie in it. A rescue.
Zoe pulled the mule to a halt near Ray's Hauling, and Mal and Zoe tumbled out, ready for immediate action. They could hear the commotion inside the building—screams and crashing sounds, as objects were thrown, breaking. They entered the building expeditiously, and with caution.
The nursery door burst open, and Zoe and Mal pointed their weapons into the room. The scene was chaotic. A loudly shrieking woman held a loudly squalling baby on one hip, while she used her other arm to hurl objects, with good aim, at Jayne Cobb. Jayne was trying to make himself small against one wall, using his arms to shield himself, but not making a move against her.
"You are, you are!" the woman yelled.
"No I ain't," Jayne replied, like a broken record. "Ain't no way."
"You are, an' I know it!" 哎呀 Āiyā that woman had a good set of lungs. "An' you know it!"
"Ma'am," Mal said. "Ma'am," he repeated, raising his voice to be heard above the cries of the infant. "嘿 Hēi ma'am, listen up!" he shouted, approaching her.
"Jayne, call off your man!" Janice hollered. Mal looked offended. "And your woman, too!" she added, as Zoe flanked her. She eyed their state of filth. "They stink to high heaven! What the 地狱 dìyù they been doin'? Dumpster divin'?"
"I ain't no ruttin' father," Jayne said stubbornly, ignoring Janice's comments about Mal and Zoe.
"This is your son. Your son! Don't ya understand?" Janice shouted, as the baby sucked in a deep breath and started up again with a great wail.
"No way, no ruttin' way," Jayne repeated insistently, as Janice commenced more incomprehensible shrieking.
"你们都 闭嘴! Nǐmen dōu bìzǔi!" Mal demanded.
Even the baby was stunned into silence for a moment. Then he resumed his fretful crying, in complete sympathy with his mother's emotion.
"Call off your man," Janice insisted, with quiet forcefulness, for a change.
"I ain't his man," Mal said in an irritated voice. "I'm his captain. Now, anybody want to explain what the 地狱 dìyù is goin' on here?"
. . .
"There has got to be an operators' manual somewhere," Simon said, with increasing frustration, as he pulled out the contents of the cockpit storage locker.
Kaylee sat with her hands on the controls, trying to feel her way into the machine. Nothin'. Then she got on her back and looked up under the control panel. Everything was right where it should be, in good working order. She understood that part just fine. Machines just had workin's, and they talked to her. But when she sat down in the pilot's seat and put her hands on the yoke, she felt nothing at all.
"You know how this shuttle works, don't you Kaylee? There must be an ignition, a throttle, a start button, a—" Simon ran out of synonyms.
"I know how the engine works, Simon. I got no idea about the start-up sequence."
"Maybe we can download an operators' manual from the cortex feed," Simon suggested. "How do you turn the cortex feed on?" He searched around the multitude of buttons and dials on the control panel, at a loss. Most of the buttons and sliders were unlabelled, and those that were had incomprehensible abbreviations. "What's an R-NAV?" he asked.
"I got no idea," Kaylee answered.
"I thought machines just…speak to you…you know—"
"Sorry, Simon, this machine just ain't talkin' to me at all."
"Well, let's try logic, then," Simon said, with increasing irritation. "There's got to be something that turns the engine on, then something that creates vertical thrust to lift the shuttle off the ground…"
"Yeah, Simon, and there's horizontal stabilizers and attitude jets and a grav boot and a—Simon! It don't matter!" Kaylee was getting increasingly annoyed. "It don't matter a bit! There's all the parts there, right where they should be. Don't mean I know how to fly the 该死的 gāisǐde thing."
They sat and huffed for a moment, then she said, "Didn't you never fly a hovercraft or nothin', when you were back in the Core?"
"No, we had a driver," he retorted, more sharply than he really intended.
"Ya never even learned to fly a hovercraft?"
"There was no occasion to learn—"
"On Harvest, all the rich kids learned to fly a hovercraft, an' everyone learned to drive a groundcar, 'less they were too poor to have one," Kaylee retorted, scornfully. "If this were the mule, I could drive it, easy."
Simon folded his arms disdainfully. "So because I can't fly a shuttle, or a hovercraft—"
"Well what gorram good is that top three-percent brain a' yours if you can't even fly a gorram—"
"Gorrammit, Kaylee! You're the mechanic! I'm just a rutting ship's doctor! What the 地狱 dìyù do I know?"
. . .
"Seems to me there's an easy solution to this problem," Mal said, deliberately calm. "Now let's just be reasonable."
"I'm all manner of reasonable," Janice said in a voice that threatened to go from zero to shrieky in a matter of seconds, "it's him what's acting like a jackass!" She stabbed her finger at Jayne's chest.
"Ain't no jackass. Ain't nobody's father neither."
Mal intervened before they could escalate again. "The solution is we all go back to the ship. Our doc is top three percent, Core-educated, best doc anywhere. I'm sure he's got a test he can run, figure out which one a' you is right." He cocked his head at them. "So we got a deal?"
They all piled into the mule, Jayne making a point of sitting next to Mal in front. Zoe sat in back next to Janice and the baby. As they got in, Janice looked assessingly at Zoe. "You're carrying, aren't you?" Janice asked.
Zoe raised her eyebrow slightly, and by the slightest movement of her body, indicated the gun strapped to her leg.
"A child," Janice amended.
"I am," Zoe replied coolly. "And I know damn well who the father is."
"So do I," Janice said huffily, and settled herself in the seat with the baby on her lap.
. . .
"Are you sure about this?" Inara asked. "Simon said Mal wanted us to stay with the ship."
"False alarm," said River. "Jayne made his bed, and now he must lie in it. Simon needs rescuing."
"What about Kaylee?" Inara asked.
"Holding her own," River answered.
They landed at the edge of the dump, right next to Shuttle Two. They opened the door to a blast of hot, putrid air that roiled up from the mounds of trash baking in the sunlight and recoiled, both momentarily glad that Mal hadn't assigned them to dump duty that afternoon. They turned their attention to Shuttle Two, where the sounds of escalating bickering could be heard even through the closed door.
"Gorrammit, Simon! You're so gorram smart, you figure it out! I'm leaving!"
The door slid open, and Kaylee appeared, with an expression like thunder on her face—looking like something neither Inara nor River had ever seen. Where was Miss Sunshine, and who was this scowling witch who had taken over her body?
"Oh!" Kaylee exclaimed, astonished, and her face underwent a dramatic shift.
"Rescue party," River announced, and strode into Shuttle Two.
"Come with me, 妹妹 mèimei," Inara said, putting an arm around the younger woman's shoulder and guiding her towards her shuttle.
. . .
Simon was still seething when he emerged from Shuttle Two after it had docked with Serenity.
"You're needed Simon. Have to figure out about the babies," River called after him, as he stomped down toward the passenger dorm.
"I need to wash this filth off my body!" Simon shouted. He slammed his way into his now seldom-used dorm room, grabbed his kit bag and a towel, and was headed toward the shower when a commotion at the cargo bay door demanded his attention.
Mal strode up the ramp, followed by Jayne and a woman Simon didn't recognize carrying a baby, both of them quarreling back and forth, while Zoe brought up the rear, glowering at them all.
"Simon!" Mal called. "Got a job for you! I need a paternity test here, 马上 mǎshàng!"
Simon stared at Mal, dumbfounded. Mal scowled back at him and quirked an eyebrow at Jayne and the woman. Simon got it. They all crowded into the infirmary. Simon readied the test, and took finger pricks from Janice and the infant. He was tempted to take a finger prick from Mal, but another look at the Captain's exasperated face told him the joke was not worth the price he would pay, so he pricked Jayne's finger without further ado.
The happy couple stood around bickering while waiting for the test results.
"I always use protection," Jayne insisted. "Always."
"It's not one hundred percent effective," Simon pointed out, as he followed the test protocol.
"He's right," Mal added. "There can be accidents. Half the babies in the 'Verse wouldn't be born if contraception was one hundred percent foolproof."
"That's for damn sure," Zoe said, patting her belly, "and I for one am glad of it."
"You are?" Janice asked. "I was. I was so proud to be carryin' the Hero of Canton's child!" she declared. "Now he ain't even glad to know I done it for him!"
Simon took a deep breath. He turned to face the assembled people. "This child is not Jayne's."
"Not Jayne's!" echoed Janice. "Well whose is he, then?"
No one had an answer for her.
Mal steered Jayne out of the infirmary and spoke to him quietly, pressing something into his hand. Then Zoe guided Janice out of the infirmary. Janice spoke to her son in a tearful sing-song, but the baby, worn out by all the emotion, had fallen into a peaceful slumber. Like most sleeping babies, he now looked like a perfect angel, and if she hadn't heard it herself, Zoe never would have believed him capable of pumping out the decibels like he had. Though, perhaps, given his inheritance from his mother's side, it wasn't surprising.
"He really is a sweetie," Zoe said quietly to Janice, asking permission with her eyes to stroke the child's soft downy hair.
"He is the best baby ever," Janice said tearfully, "and I wouldn't trade him for anything in the 'Verse."
Zoe joined Mal in the cargo bay, giving Jayne some privacy with Janice in the passenger lounge. Janice looked at Jayne with tears in her eyes. Now he was gonna gloat, and tell her I-told-ya-so. Men could be such 混蛋 húndàn. Jayne approached and she braced herself.
He spoke in a surprisingly soft and gentle voice. "Janice, I want you ta know—I'm a—it's—well, I'm honored ta think you wanted a child a' mine, even knowin' I weren't gonna be around ta help you with it. You're a brave woman." He cupped her face in his hands. "You're a very fine woman, an' I'm pleased I met ya again here on Beylix." He gave her a kiss. Weren't gonna be on her mouth, but she turned her head. Then he handed her a little package. "This is for the little one. Even though he ain't mine, it's only right that somebody give you a helping hand." Whatever else he was gonna say was cut off by another kiss.
"Jayne!" she said, in a breathless whisper. "You're still the Hero of Canton." Then she carried her little bundle of joy proudly across the junk-strewn cargo bay, down the ramp, and into the mule, where Zoe waited to take her home.
. . .
"It don't make no sense," Jayne said. He and Mal were leaning over the catwalk rail, overlooking the mountains of spare parts heaped all about. "Hell, Mal, she still thinks I'm some kind of ruttin' hero. Don't understand why them Mudder folk thought I was a hero in the first place." He paused, a disturbed look on his face. "Hell, the kid'll probably grow up with her tellin' him that I'm his father, no matter that the test said I weren't."
"Most like," Mal agreed. "It's not about what's true, it's about what she needs. You already done more fathering for that kid than whatever 混蛋 húndàn sired him. Just by showin' you cared about him and his mother."
"Never aimed to be a father."
"It's about what she needs, Jayne. She needs her kid's father to be a hero, and you're the hero she knows."
"Still don't make no sense."
. . .
.
.
.
fin
glossary
哎呀 Āiyā [Damn]
嘿 Hēi [Hey]
地狱 dìyù [hell]
你们都 闭嘴! Nǐmen dōu bìzǔi! [Everybody shut the hell up]!
该死的 gāisǐde [damn]
妹妹 mèimei [little sister]
马上 mǎshàng [right now]
混蛋 húndàn [bastards]
And that's the end...for now. The next story picks up right where this leaves off. So, how did you like it? Write a review. :-)